Lindsay (first passion), Jacqui (still a close friend), Sheena (not seen since the mid-'60s until this encounter).
All revisiting the empty & derelict Wennington in 1995.
UP IN THE MORNING & OFF TO SCHOOL
(Part Two - concluded)
Wennington was never a progressive school of the Summerhill persuasion and, more conventionally, Kenneth forbade smoking. Naturally a number of us took to it with enormous enthusiasm. Not only was it forbidden and therefore to be indulged as a matter of principle, having a fag hanging out of the corner of your mouth and squinting through the smoke went very well with listening to Saturday Club down Lovers’ Lane. We embraced readily the squalor that Kenneth described in his colourful denunciations of smoking and we would stand beneath dripping rhododendron bushes, ankle deep in mud, practising our smoking styles. We gloried in the degeneracy that Kenneth railed against. We were happy to identify ourselves with those dull-eyed lost souls who were denied the glories of long hikes across the moors with the wind whipping around their bare legs. And the marginal risk of being caught added spice to the vice too. Kenneth always used to announce his rambles through the woods unwittingly by jingling the keys in his pockets and delivering his trademark throat clearing sound. On a couple of occasions when short of a smoke, my best mate Geoff Deering and I would silently approach the entrance to Lovers’ Lane, he with keys and I with my uncanny facsimile of Kenneth’s cough. A swift rendition of both would cause panic and flight and Geoff and I would slip into the Lane and harvest the bushes of the jettisoned ciggies.
If these were fairly widely shared experiences of rebellion ‘agin the government’, there were other more personal areas of dissent. Geoff and I developed a fanatical antipathy towards PE and games and would go to ingenious lengths to avoid them. At our high point of creativity we were fortunate in the school’s PE teacher, an uncharacteristically tolerant local man called Frank Leafhead. Week after week he would castigate us for our lateness, our lack of kit, our apparent inability to perform even the most routine of physical manoeuvres. Punishment never worked. It generally took the form of something called circuit training, which comprised simply running around the perimeter of the playing field. This Geoff and I would have to do while Frank carried on with football, cricket or athletics. We developed a kind of arthritic shuffle that, at a glance, might be taken for running but which didn’t actually involve either foot in leaving the ground at the same time. We finally broke Frank’s heart completely one winter’s afternoon when we turned up on time but not wearing the appropriate kit. Geoff wore an outsize pair of brown coverall dungarees, a pair of army boots and a tin helmet and I wore a camelhair dressing gown, slippers and a trilby. From that crucial point on, we were sentenced in every PE lesson to a punishing run down the entire length of the drive and back. Employing our special circuit shuffle, we would proceed as far as the short cut to Wetherby – a track that cut between fields – and we would conceal ourselves behind an accommodating bush and get out the cigs.
On reflection, much of my small-scale rebellion was done with Geoff. I think we saw ourselves as a sort of revolutionary cell, dedicated to a war of attrition. Adolescent hubris and insensitivity insulated us against any developing sense of responsibility throughout our time at Wennington and neither of us was ever courted for prefectorial office. This released us from what we saw as numbing orthodoxy and we passed through the school untouched by academic, artistic or sporting success. Instead we explored every single tributary of the main drains in the woods. We built a two-storey den in a bush and attempted (unsuccessfully) to seduce a number of girls inside its dark loamy interior. We brewed mead one summer, incubating it in Kenneth and Frances’ airing cupboard. (Drunk while packing at the end of term, Geoff fell into his trunk and, drunk too, I locked the lid. Much later, sober and horribly hung over, I tore the lid open to find him curled up in a foetal ball and fast asleep).
And then we left Wennington in 1963 in a blaze of bravado, ready for that big, bad world whose allure we had contemplated so wistfully for so long. And we spent two or three rather confused years finding out that, whilst it was certainly very big and not without its excitements, it wasn’t very bad, just puzzling. And we hitchhiked triumphantly back up to Wennington to see those who had remained behind and to tell tales of voracious sexual conquest, massive drug indulgence and, of course, rock and roll – for this was now the era of The Beatles and The Stones and the ‘60s had really begun.
What was not immediately apparent to us, either within our new bright, shiny lives down south or back inside the shabby security of the school was that the world that Kenneth and Frances had tried to conserve at Wennington had already changed. The material prosperity that had eluded that idealistic generation of the inter-war years and that was so long awaited through the ‘50s suddenly arrived. Kids had money; kids had power; kids had kudos. Hair grew; skirts retreated; trousers flared. All those symbols of youthful self-indulgence against which the Barnes’ had set themselves so implacably were adopted wholesale, nationally and across the class barriers. The notion of clean-limbed youths in shorts and sandals, discussing philosophy over cocoa, or clambering cheerily up steep slopes with the rain in their faces seemed locked into a distant past. Wennington was so very much a living embodiment of a vision born in a different era that inevitably many of the accoutrements of those times became completely anachronistic almost overnight.
In the end, the crowning irony for me was that, having for so long adopted a stance of implacable opposition to the status quo at Wennington, I found myself largely unable to take seriously the alternative culture that grew up around sex and drugs and rock and roll. Although all three phenomena played an active part in my post-school evolution, in the final analysis, the sentimental cant and outright hypocrisy that lay just behind so much of the hippy ethos was simply indigestible. I was surrounded by ex-public and grammar schoolboys and girls all frantically divesting themselves of everything that they had accepted as unquestionable convention a year or two before and none of it rang true.
Bit by bit it became evident that so much of what was being represented as desirable – the small, non-hierarchical community, freedom of thought and speech, non-violence and pacifism as plausible realities – had already entered my consciousness. However constrained by the Barnes’ idiosyncrasies those notions were at Wennington, they were represented as constant and palpable possibilities for the wider world. The synthesis that occurred through the interplay of Kenneth’s muscular, bullish Quakerism, Brian Hill’s altogether more refined libertarianism, Roger Gerhardt’s eccentric and individualistic humanism was a rich and potent influence on us all.
I am enormously glad that I was born when I was. I believe that I have lived through five of the most exciting decades of the past five hundred years. I’m gratified that I was able to experience that crucial transition from the 1950s to the ‘60s. I share the not uncommon view that, in many important respects, the 20th century truly came into its cultural own in that brief span of years. And I’m glad most of all that I was given the opportunity to grow early into a powerful sense both of optimism and scepticism. I have witnessed ordinary people, young and adult, organising their affairs efficiently, honestly, responsibly, equably and to their mutual benefit without the need for authoritarian structures and rigid rules. And I have witnessed – and witness still – the insistence on the part of bureaucrats, bosses, teachers and politicians that without authoritarian structures and rigid rules order collapses into anarchy. Wennington was a flawed community in many ways; for some it manifestly failed. But fascinatingly it continues to exist vigorously in the phantom form of the Wennington School Association, which stretches across the world 29 years after its material demise. Which must prove something.
11:30:04 PM 
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